DENVER -- A senior NASA administrator said Tuesday he has had several discussions with the new owners of Loveland's Rocky Mountain Center for Innovation and Technology, and plans a visit to the former Agilent Technologies campus during his Colorado stay.

Robert "Joe" Shaw, chief of business development and partnerships at NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio, was among speakers at the Executive ACE Exchange in Denver, sponsored by the Colorado Association for Manufacturing and Technology (CAMT).

While he mentioned neither Loveland nor the rechristened Agilent campus during his remarks to a group of about 100 technology industry executives and local officials, he told how NASA's changing mission will spur a rebirth in American manufacturing.

"Since Obama came into office, there has been some fundamental, top-down change at NASA," Shaw said. "Getting involved in economic vitality is an important part of our mission now." The change means "leveraging our research, and finding dual use for those technologies."

After speaking to the group, Shaw said he had been in talks since early December with Bill Murphree and Buddy Steen, principals in Cumberland & Western Resources LLC, the Kentucky-based development company that bought the Agilent site from the city for $5 million in November.

CAMT chief executive Elaine Thorndike said she would also meet with the Cumberland & Western pair on Thursday to discuss how her agency might collaborate on recruiting technology manufacturing businesses to the Loveland campus.

Thorndike said that the ACE initiative would also spread throughout Colorado.

"We've got some discussion scheduled with Cumberland & Western this week," she said. "But based on the demand we've seen and that we know is there, we're going to be looking at other locations around the state."

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